ASUU Has Been On Strike For 52 Months – Islamic Clerics Lament

 

The Federal Government has been called to act immediately and end the ongoing strike action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

 

The League of Imams and Alfas in Ogun State lamented that the strike action has gone on for a cumulative period of 52 months since 1999.

 

This, the Islamic clerics said amounts to a total of two years and four months altogether.

 

The incessant strike action in universities, they said, had turned Nigerian youths into unskilled and lazy individuals, wasting their fruitful years at home when they ought to have graduated.

 

In a statement jointly signed by their President-General and the Secretary-General, Dhikrullahi Afe-Babalola and Tajudeen Mustapha, the Islamic leaders maintained that the ASUU industrial actions had occurred 16 times since the return of democracy, calling on the government to address the situation once and for all.

 

They begged the government at all levels to rebuild the nation’s university system by honouring all contractual agreements without further delay.

 

“From 1999 till date, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) had gone on strike 16 times which had covered a period of fifty two months,” they said.

 

Aside from the academic union, they noted that activities in public universities had also been disrupted by strike actions embarked upon by other unions at various times.

 

While warning that the nation would remain a failed state should there be no deliberate commitments by the government to resolve the many problems confronting it, the clerics condemned the spate of killings and kidnapping in Nigeria.